Keith,
> James Gilbert wrote:
> [snip war story]
> Do you *know* it's not the floppy or parallel controller that's
> damaged? (Depending on what your tape drive hangs off of). Try your
> tape drive on another machine...
The drive hangs off an Iomega "Dash" card (2Mb
floppy controller). I'm sure its OK, because it
talks to the drive; the drive just doesn't sniff
the tape when I insert it, then claims it isn't
formatted.
> > So now I guess I need to tell them to buy a new
> > tape drive! However, they now have a bigger hard
> > disk, and Iomega don't make the Ditto Easy 3200
> > drives any more, so I'm wondering if there is a
> > new drive with larger capacity which will read the
> > data off their old Travan 1.6/3.2 tape, and which
> > functions well under Linux. Any suggestions? I
> > was looking at the HP Colorado drives (5, 8 and
> > 14Gb), but they seem to say on their web site that
> > only the 5 and 8 Gb drives can read 3.2 tapes
> > under (cringe) Windows.
> >
> >From what I saw, I suspect they're excluding Windows NT, rather than
> Linux. I don't know how Linux is with these, but I doubt HP does
> either.
>
> Have you considered SCSI? Linux seems to have more seamless support for
> that. (You could pretty much stop hanging out on lists and on the
> floppy tape home page). Take a look at
>
> http://www.aiwa.com/csd/product/prodfram.htm
>
> I recently bought a "naked" OEM version of one of these 8GB drives from
> www.techstore.com for under $100, and it's working fine so far...
>
> I'm not sure what your 3.2G tapes are: maybe QIC-3020? If it's that,
> the AIWA's supposed to be able to read it.
>
> And a SCSI controller? Not hard to find, or expensive. Mine at home
> inhabits my SoundBlaster sound card.
My tapes are QIC-3020, and yes, I think I'll go
for an 8Mb TR4 drive, from Seagate or Aiwa, and an
SCSI controller.
Many thanks, James
James G.R. Gilbert
The Sanger Centre
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton
Cambridge Tel: 01223 494906
CB10 1SA Fax: 01223 494919
